Open Source Publishing – Graphic Design Caravan

SHMN (Inkboard)

Inkboard is an Inkscape extension that allows remote collaboration over the network. In inkscape-devel, there’s a thread where people get all excited over it, and manage to bring down a server as a result 🙂

It’s hard not to get overexcited over tools that have collaboration built into them. They give rise to book covers that I’ll repost again&again, and to LAN parties, like last week’s Software History Mapping Night.
Strange, that the tech back kitchen for this was also about software history. As far as I could tell, Inkboard isn’t part of Inkscape’s lifeline at the moment. Nothing wrong with that. This was a constraint that Nicolas answered with very nice php.

Inkscape compiles fine with Inkboard support in both Ubuntu and Gentoo. We have been able to see the extra menu between Effects and Help:

We have been chatting away with the Pedro XMPP client, but we have not been able to share and work on a common SVG document, which was one of the ideas for the SHMN. Another idea: collaboration is not entirely in the tools 🙂

In Gentoo the Inkboard useflag is called jabber, and this is the recipe for compiling Inkscape with Inkboard support (and other things) in Ubuntu.